Individual | Inducted 2025
Precious Brady-Davis is the first Black openly trans woman elected to public office in Cook County history and the first to serve on a water reclamation district in the U.S. After being appointed to the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago by Illinois Governor JB Pritzker in 2023, she was elected as an MWRD Commissioner in 2024. She believes strongly in protecting the community’s primary source of drinking water, Lake Michigan, and is invested in advancing green infrastructure to improve community resilience and prevent flooding across Cook County.
In addition, she has served as Associate Regional Communications Director of the Sierra Club, leading campaigns that champion renewable energy, hold corporate polluters accountable, and fight climate change. In October 2025, she was celebrated as one of Out Magazine’s OUT100 list of “the LGBTQ+ people making the world bolder and brighter in 2025.”
A Nebraska native of multiracial background, Brady-Davis came to Chicago to study at Columbia College Chicago, from which she graduated in 2013 with a degree in Interdisciplinary Studies. She subsequently served as the Assistant Director of Diversity Recruitment Initiatives at Columbia, where she implemented a campus-wide diversity initiative and provided leadership on national diversity recruitment and strategic policy initiatives.
She began her professional career serving as the Youth Outreach Coordinator at the Center on Halsted, where she coordinated youth programming surrounding HIV prevention, transgender advocacy, and LGBT leadership development. With the Center on Halsted she launched a $1.6 million CDC grant which provided outreach, education, and testing services to over 3,000 African American and Latino gay, bi, and trans youth across Chicagoland between the ages of 13 and 29.
A lifelong social justice advocate, environmentalist, and communications professional, she is the author of the memoir “I Have Always Been Me,” published in 2021 by Topple Books, an Amazon Publishing imprint edited by Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame inductee Joey Soloway. She resides with her husband Myles in Hyde Park, where they are raising their two daughters Zayn and Zyon.